‘Faithful for Life’: a Moral Reflection : Catholic church: Lifestyle and policy based on ‘choice’ has wreaked havoc on society; the bishops offer an alternative.

For anyone who has spent any time considering our nation’s abortion problem, one fact soon becomes apparent; the abortion debate is about much more than abortion.

Life, death, love, commitment, responsibility, freedom--all the deepest dimensions of human beings come together in this single issue. In this sense, an individual’s and a society’s position on abortion is like the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it lie a whole set of fundamental assumptions about the nature and destiny of human beings.

For this reason, the question of abortion--and to equal extent, euthanasia--is a profoundly moral one. These problems certainly engage us politically. Indeed, the abortion debate probably has been the most contentious political debate in our nation for more than two decades. But this debate is so contentious precisely because of the very real, if often ignored, moral heart of these issues. Political slogans like “choice” and “the big tent” fail completely to grapple with this.

Today the United States Catholic bishops are issuing “Faithful for Life: A Moral Reflection,” a pastoral letter directly addressing abortion, euthanasia and other life issues. It is our hope that all citizens, of any or no faith, will seriously consider its arguments and approach.

It has been 10 years since the American bishops made abortion the subject of a major pastoral document. Those 10 years have witnessed an enormous change in how the American people understand our most pressing problems. Traditional political and economic theories have come to seem insufficient to explain, much less halt, the growing coarseness and decline of civil society around us.

Elements of our current social distress include family breakdown, child abuse, random violence, rising rates of illegitimacy, increased misery and despair among the poor, and, not least, an abortion rate of 1.5 million a year, coupled with growing efforts to legalize, through euthanasia, the direct killing of the elderly and others deemed inconvenient.

All public policies are based on certain assumptions about human nature. For the last three decades, at least, our society has acted on the premise that human freedom is best achieved by liberation from all restraints--restraints that, in this view, include traditional codes of ethics, some fixed notions of right and wrong, of obligations owed each other. The only obligations individuals needed to acknowledge--even toward a family member or a child called into being by their own actions--were those they themselves chose to recognize. Choice itself, rather than the value or consequences of what is chosen, became all important.

In the case of abortion this meant that choosing to destroy a human life became as morally valid as choosing to let a child live.

But what does it mean for a nation when the lives of a whole class of human beings can be terminated as the result of someone else’s choice? What does it mean when we allow this choice to be made 4,300 times each day, 1.5 million times each year and on the most weak and vulnerable among us.

The Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision codified this destructive ideology of choice. That decision, and the abortion license it invented, redefined the individual and the individual’s relationships to others, both inside and outside the family. Abortion embodies an ideology of extreme, radical autonomy, an autonomy that recognizes no binding obligations or commitments to another and only one duty: to satisfy one’s own desires and appetites.

It is tragic but inevitable that a society acting on these assumptions about human beings will soon find itself facing the very social pathologies that worry us today. Accept legal abortion’s premises--a right of unlimited “choice”--and invite family disintegration.

In opposition to “choice,” the Catholic Church instead offers “fidelity”: unwavering loyalty to those we choose and to those who have been given to us, those we do not choose, often those in most desperate need.

“Choice” whether through abortion or euthanasia divides, and degrades, human beings into the wanted and the unwanted. Fidelity changes our entire focus. It recognizes that individuals achieve their fullest freedom precisely by fulfilling obligations to those most in need of our care and solicitude. Fidelity turns “choice” on its head: It is we who have been chosen to go out of our way for others.

Certainly, Faithful for Life reaffirms the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion, euthanasia and other threats to the dignity of the human being; in this there is and can be nothing new. But in doing so once again, Faithful for Life is the clearest “anti-choice” statement made by the Catholic bishops to date.

More than two decades after the Roe vs. Wade decision, the deadly consequences of a lifestyle and public policy based on choice are clear for all to see. As clear as the wholesome consequences of embracing fidelity. As clear the choice between life and death.